DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS | Hacker News Reader

DESKTOP2 – A Graphical User Interface for DOS

mevis-research.de

133 pointsmarcodiego64 comments

*DESKTOP is somewhat in the middle between MS-Windows and Norton Commander...*

Does anyone here recall the intuitive nature of Norton Commander, especially in terms of file operations? This may be reaching back about three decades, so my recollection might be a bit hazy. As I recall, it was a viable alternative to Windows Explorer even during the era of Windows 3.1.

One particular aspect that stands out to me was the dual-pane interface. This allowed for seamless navigation within the directory hierarchy - you could tag files in the pane on one side, then initiate a move or copy operation to the directory in the other pane, and vice versa.

Given the complexity of today's file operations and UIs, Norton Commander's straightforward approach feels refreshingly simple and efficient in hindsight. I'd be interested to hear other users' reminiscences and thoughts.

Norton-style commanders were huge in xUSSR.

FAR and Dos Navigator were among the most popular, and in the end FAR won it (as it was windows app and got rich ecosystem of plugins). They were good not only due dual panel interface (newer versions were actually multi-panel, where you cold go as many 2 panel "workspaces" as you want), but they enabled extremely efficient keyboard only workflows. Windows couldn't get it even now.

Far is still alive: https://www.farmanager.com/

Also I don't use it, but I install midnight commander on every my linux setup just for memories.

Don't forget Volkov Commander (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkov_Commander). It was convenient for bootable floppies because of its small size and self-contained design.

Far 2 has a Linux (as well as macOS and BSD) port that is quite active: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l. Far Manager was what I switched to from Norton Commander. These days I prefer Double Commander, a cross-platform Total Commander workalike: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/.

Can't live without Double Commander. If anyone is wondering how it looks: https://ibb.co/Xbbp9qM

Nice Motif window decorations. What window manager is it?

This is what my Double Commander looks like: https://paste.dbohdan.com/doublecmd.mr2hnji.png. (Small screenshot because I am connected to my computer from an iPad at half its native resolution.)

Looks like SGI Motif or 5DWM.

Thanks! This is Xfce4 with an SGI theme and OneStepBack style.

If I recall correctly one of selling points of Volkov commander was that it was written in assembler and was .com file, so it was smaller than .exe (.com files didn’t had some bloat but paid for it with file size limit).

I still use midnight commander on Linux.

In SCADA systems I know teams that still use XTreeGold on Windows today

Check out ztreewin. It’s xtree gold only windows native.

https://www.ztree.com/

> Does anyone here recall

Well, midnight commander is still actively updated even today in 2023.

Was going to mention mc as modern. Most people wouldn't see past the TUI.

Yeah mc is great. Especially if you want to select an arbitrary group of files in a huge folder.

I was a heavy user of "The Directory Commander" or DCOM.

I found an image at http://old-dos.ru/screens/6/9/8/5443786e5b93f5c6b2a83da43df6...

I recall being able to function really effectively with it's multiple panes and tagging, however it's been 30 years, so my memory might be entirely rosey

It also performed the very important function of setting up a parallel cable connection to my brother’s computer so we could play DOOM together.

If you're looking for present-day windows equalent, Total Commander (https://www.ghisler.com/) is excellent -daily driver for me since '99.

The name that will help here is an orthodox file manager.

I used Norton Commander back in the DOS days, but hated the Windows product. I still find myself tossing Midnight Commander onto places I only have a text mode console for. (Great for Windows Core.)

My daily file manager now is Directory Opus. The dual pane stuff is at the core of how I use it.

Was a bit like XTree Gold, but not quite.

Xtreegold reincarnated in ztreewin https://www.ztree.com/. It is not free but it is a native windows program. There is even a fan page with a list of clones resembling more or less to xtree https://www.xtreefanpage.org/x63clone.htm

I credit XTree with building some of my foundational CS intuition. At 11 y/o I became a master at grouping, filtering, tagging, inverting, summing subgroups (directories), and coming up with efficient routes to moving stuff around as we coped with our ever-stuffed 10MB drive.

I basically use Total Commander and Double Commander (open source TC clone) even on Linux as file managers (TC is a windows program but i use it via Wine, DC works natively on Linux but has missing features and bugs but it is easier to work with other native Linux apps while TC needs a bunch of workarounds).

These are NC-like programs.

It is funny that people mostly remember Norton Commander while it came very late in msdos history.

Back in 1987 we were using Microsoft Dos Manager on our intel 8088 that was doing pretty much the same thing already, offering a dual pane.

You can see it here:

https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/ext/microsoft/dosmgr... (F9 to split panes, options menu allow to change color scheme)

PC Tools was another popular option back then. I really liked its PC Shell.

> it was a viable alternative to Windows Explorer

Because there was no "Windows Explorer" before Windows 95 and the "MSDOS Executive"/"File Manager" that was used before that was truly horrible and non-intuitive.

> One particular aspect that stands out to me was the dual-pane interface.

All the file managers I've used recently on my desktop support this (In Caja and the KDE one, press F3 to switch to a dual pane view).

What do you mean by "recall"? FAR Manager (which is modern incarnation of NC) is second program I install on any new Windows system (after Firefox). All these graphical file managers (both Explorer and Finder) are unusable to me. Absence of FAR is one of the main reasons I can not bear MacOS and, no, Midnight Commander is not replacement for modern FAR.

I use Directory Opus on Windows these days.

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/

Does it have command line and terminal embedded?

Heh, I've been there as well a decade ago when switching from windows to macos. Far manager was also the first program I'd also install on any box. I can assure you, this will eventually pass :)

To be fair, far is also not a match to modern file browsers like https://binarynights.com (forklift), especially if you need s3 integration etc

I've worked 6 months on corporate Macbook Pro 16" (M1 Max), and changed it to Dell (which is SLOWER) as soon as it become possible :-)

And, not, FAR IS match to these browsers, as here are hundreds if not thousands plugins. S3? We got it. DropBox? We got it. Any file-access protocol, including IMAP (!)? We got it! Also, editor with syntax coloring of hundreds of text formats, embedded command line with history (which works perfectly with addition of POSIX tools, like find, grep, cut, xargs, sort, etc), several ways to rename files by template ("multiple rename" in ForkLift features), etc, etc, etc.

Almost any task by organizing, editing and managing files you can name has plugin for FAR, if it is not embedded feature.

Does ForkLift support full-powered perl-compatible regular expressions for its operations? FAR does, including batch search-n-replace in text files (and archives!).

And it is only 1% of available plugins :-)

Plus all of that is controlled by keyboard, no mouse required at all. And all shortcuts are configurable, and here is embedded macro recording abilities.

Technically, OFM or Orthodox File Managers, all you wanted to know and didn't dare to ask here:

https://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml

BTW even if not strictly orthodox, the 7-zip file manager can be used in dual pane and it is very handy.

another good one, originally steming from the Amiga:

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/

Icons used to be meaningful and convey what they did. Now it's mostly shiny fancy crap, and they all look the same. I always find it difficult to find VSCode on macOS because a lot of apps use similar colors and patterns.

I tried customizing VSC's icon but it goes back to its ugly confusing default icon after each update.

Or worse, icons get grouped and they removed the labels for apps when launched. Fairly awful having to scroll through the equal icons to get back into the expected terminal or file browser path.

Usability has really been going down the drain to copy smartphones into the desktop.

My pet grievance is Apple's progressive transition from direct manipulation and drag-and-drop to the most evil click-and-wait-to-reveal-and-reorient-the-pointer-to-eventually-drag scheme, e.g., for proxy icons.

I’ve designed many interfaces. Icons and use of icons is a difficult story. It used to be simpler, because many of the operations the icons would represent were digitized actions that previously had a physical component. For example: save was iconified as a diskette. Later we had upload icons being a cloud with an arrow going up to indicate ‘upload to the cloud’.

Today we design Interfaces for Machine Learning software, where an action might be ‘load language model’. These are actions that don’t have a history rooted in physical space. Or in the case of the upload icon, a visual metaphor.

So the iconography space is currently in an interesting phase. We have to create new metaphors if we want to keep utilizing benefits of icons in UI.

This is not really extrapolable enough to claim a trend. I am using a piece of software from the 90s that has an icon for "Load transistor switching activity history" which is frankly even more abstract. Yet most if not all desktop/office software from the 20s sill uses icons that are based on physical objects. They even use a diskette as save.

i.e. Specialized software is going to be specialized. It's not new.

While I also dislike the trend towards minimal icons, I don’t think the ones in this project are a good example. They are more whimsical than they are helpful. Without the text I wouldn’t be able to tell what they mean.

I love this user testimonial in particular...

>i love your gui!!! it's great! my only problem is that i can't read german so i am forced to navigate using either trial-and-error or my trusty german-english dictionary (which is not well equipped at translating computer jargon!!) anyway, this is probably a lost cause and i understand you not wanting to go through all the hassel of translating it -- i was just wondering!! but all the same, great job!! it's a wonderful piece of software!!

The cute typo in the review reminded me of this old joke (my apologies in advance):

David Hasselhoff tells his assistant: “From now on, I want be known as The Hoff. Just The Hoff.”

Says the assistant: “Sure, boss. No hassle.”

Speaking of German: does anyone know why the favicon of the site is the one of Fraunhofer? What is the history?

Apparently the author works there, and is hosting this page the classic academic way: out of a user directory (http://mre-web.mevis.fraunhofer.de/~ritter/awakeideas/).

I am from that time, and it's funny that I've never heard about this. Sometimes it's sad to see such a complex project that probably hasn't been used much.

This resource and the comments highlight the idea that an OS shell is not just a piece of software that runs in a terminal emulator. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions out there that OS shells are synonymous with bash, zsh, fish etc. But they can and used to be richer.

I’ve also seen many references to dual pane file managers in this thread but no mention of the arguable leader of this group, which is still going strong on windows; Directory Opus.

My father used to use another one, I think it was called START and made in Czech. Unfortunately I can't find it on any internet archive sites :(

That will almost certainly have been renamed to another name early on in its lifetime. So unfortunately you probably need to know what it was renamed to.

The only START I could find is this http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/64_dosstart.html

The amount of soul in this desktop interface is off the charts.

This was my first (tiny) taste of a non-MS-DOS/Windows environment for PC.

Back in middle school, circa 1997 or 98, with the tiny scraps of time I could get on an Internet connection with a web browser, I ended up using Infoseek (or similar) to look for software I could run on my 486 at home. Amusingly, I think this was on a Mac.

One of the first things I found was Desktop2, but alas I never got it to run because the installer I downloaded ended up corrupted. Probably on account of using the Mac to download it and save it on a floppy (probably using the PC Exchange Mac extension?)

Never actually saw the thing run until I YouTube'd it more than 20 years later.

Shame I never got it to run - it looks like it actually would have been pretty useful and interesting.

Not long after I found FreeBSD, got dialup at home, and embarked on a project to download and run that.

Man. The filesystem and disk features look particularly awesome. I would have definitely got mileage out of it back in those days. Alas!

Not quite the same, but I used to use DESQview back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

Was a very cool product to bring multi-tasking into the DOS world.

Norton commander = the original ORTHODOX FILEMANAGER. See wikipedia for a list of all the clones, including mid ight commmander, total commander, double commander, volcov commander, far, opus

I made my DOS apps using National Instruments DOS GUI.. it was oddly wonderful, and super easy to make full fledged applications with 'c' calls. It's a shame they now just make bloatware for niche testing environments.

Then I got into visual basic in the later 90's and was able to build amazing apps as well. Then it all got overly complicated seemingly.

From the screenshots, it is a bit cluttered. I know the VGA resolution is limiting, but GUIs were not uncommon at that time.

Only for the record/for some retro experimenter, there was at the time also MC Shell, the Author, Mike Manning, allowed the redistribution of the full shell (it was Shareware at the time):

http://reboot.pro/index.php?showtopic=752

Looks MUCH nicer. I remember some library, which I saw used in an accounting package, that had a very OpenWindows look that worked well on low resolution screens.

There was Ensemble/New Deal, though that was later (derived from Geoworks):

http://toastytech.com/guis/nd32.html

That’s not the one. Close though and very pleasant to use.

Hey! It looks like the Amiga workbench!

My favorite file manager was dm220 by Bob Abrahams.

With that said, I never heard of DESKTOP2, but looks very interesting.

The real question is why in tarnation does this redirect to "operacao404.mj.gov.br".

I think it is beautiful.

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